Electric Capital annual survey: total developers working in crypto fell 7% YoY globally, and Solana was the most popular blockchain among new developers
not exactly devs, but we thought ETF traction in 2024 was worth summarizing and understanding. What makes Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs the best performing ETFs of all [image] Ren / @0xren_cf : We looked at net new smart contract logic to compare innovation across EVM chains and I was struck by Base's traction (exceeded my expectations) Base devs cooked in 2024 and Base now accounts for the most new smart contract logic deployed among major EVM chains [image] Curtis Spencer / @jubos : The 2024 @ElectricCapital Developer Report out today! It's a huge effort not only by the Electric team, but also the broader crypto industry to gather and analyze all of the data. You can see this in the contributor growth to the open source taxonomy as of 2019 vs. 2024: [image] @adamshurwitz : The @ElectricCapital 2024 crypto developer report 🔷🌏 - Network with the most amount of devs is @ethereum - Region with the most of devs is Asia Both have many layers, variation, and the potential to contribute to open source, programmable, and self owned assets and data! Forums: r/CryptoCurrency : Solana Was the Biggest Draw for New Crypto Developers in 2024: Electric Capital
Context & Ripple Effects
Developer participation had already contracted sharply in late 2023, when monthly active open-source crypto developers were reported down 25% year over year after the prior developer downturn. This survey indicates that the overall talent pool was still shrinking in 2024, even as activity was redistributing among networks.
The results separate ecosystem scale from incremental momentum: Ethereum retained the largest developer base, while Solana drew the most newcomers and Base led major EVM chains in net new smart-contract logic. That is a meaningful shift from earlier coverage in which Ethereum led the open-source ecosystem as the dominant developer community.
First-order effects
- Electric Capital's results give Solana a clear recruiting and ecosystem-momentum signal among first-time crypto developers, while Ethereum remains the largest established developer hub.
- Base gains evidence of outsized EVM application-building activity, despite the 7% global decline in total crypto developers.
Second-order effects
- Networks competing for builders will face a sharper distinction between retaining an installed developer base and attracting new entrants; developer tooling, grants, and deployment economics become more consequential competitive levers.
- A smaller total pool raises the value of platforms that convert developers into deployed applications, putting more attention on measures such as new smart-contract logic rather than developer counts alone.
Third-order effects
- If developer participation remains concentrated in a handful of chains, crypto infrastructure may consolidate around ecosystems with the strongest onboarding, tooling, and application distribution rather than fragment across many general-purpose networks.
- The survey reinforces a maturing-market pattern: aggregate developer growth can be weak while innovation reallocates toward specific execution environments, making network-level activity a more important indicator than sector-wide headcount.
The trend: Crypto development is shifting from broad ecosystem expansion toward competition for new builders and deployable application activity among a smaller set of leading chains.